Tag Archives: space!

Do you ever suspect that the world might be a much happier place if more things were just made out of strawberry pop tarts? Just putting the idea out there…I mean, I think this could be a real solution to society’s many ailments.

I just finished reading Orson Scott Card’s 1985 sci-fi novel Ender’s Game. It was great, on many levels – plot, characterization, evocative imagery, insightful commentary on the nature of the human condition. Aside from all that, though, one of the other aspects of the novel that I really enjoyed was the character names. First of all, ‘Ender’s Game‘ is a seriously kick-ass title for a book. It just sounds cool. The fact that Ender is the name of the main character is a bonus. And the entire story is populated by characters with interesting names. Here are a few of them:

★ Ender Wiggin

★ Valentine Wiggin

★ Petra Arkanian

★ Carn Carby

★ Crazy Tom

★ Sargeant Dap

★ Dink Meeker

★ Julian “Bean” Delphiki

★ Rose the Nose

★ Hot Soup

★ Fly Molo

★ Pol Slattery

I mean, would you not want to hang out with any and all of those dudes, based solely on their appellations? And sure, yeah, a couple of those are Battle School nicknames, but most of them are their legit birth names. Awesome.

Sometimes when things are getting me down, I like to imagine myself as a student at Pacific Tech, hanging with Chris, Mitch, Jordan, Ick, and Lazlo. I would spend my days discussing subatomic particle theory, playing pranks on Kent, jumping around in huge piles of popcorn created by a giant laser beam from space, and following dudes who live in my closet down into underground abandoned mine shafts.